


What Tangled Webs We’ve Woven

by mrjengablock



Category: Naruto
Genre: Back Characters, Canon-Typical Violence, Fix-It, Left Front and Center Characters, Multi, Sing it with me!, Snippets - Format, Worldbuilding Exercises, side characters
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-05
Updated: 2020-03-25
Packaged: 2020-08-10 04:02:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 15,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20129029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mrjengablock/pseuds/mrjengablock
Summary: There’s a theory that all people can be connected in six degrees of relationships. Let’s widen the lens, shall we?#10: prey animals don't have forward facing eyes, ya know.





	1. CPS can be a one-legged barwoman

**Author's Note:**

  * For [treatyofversigh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/treatyofversigh/gifts).

> A collection of snips that feature original characters by myself and treatyofversigh as the main or central characters. My aim is to explore the world of Naruto, sometimes smoothing over plot holes or adding some AU twists.

The Watering Hole began as an inside joke between two friendly shinobi and quickly spiraled out of control when one died on a mission and the other lost her right leg, said “Fuck it”, and opened up that bar they’d always talked about. It hadn’t really started out as a shinobi bar, but since the owner—a woman with only one leg, a prosthetic right one, and the biggest burliest arms this side of Kumo—was a shinobi, that sort of clientele tended to drift that way. 

And in Mist, no civilian was dumb enough to get drunk around a bunch of crazed murderers. Kaji liked to think they had some of the smartest civilian folk in the world, but then she remembered that these people (somewhat) willingly lived in the Bloody Mist and quickly changed her mind. They were just a different brand of crazy. 

She’d come to know many of the brands that existed as a shinobi, but the full breadth of her kind’s broken, fucked-up-ed-ness hadn’t been revealed to her until she became a bartender. It was unofficial law that any shinobi in search of a drink was also in need of a therapist. And since no shinobi worth their salt would willingly reveal private things to a stranger, they did the second best thing and got so godsdamned pissed that they forgot their own names.

One particular stripe of crazy who sometimes walked into her establishment was Shinomizu Mukuro. She wouldn’t blame anyone for being skeptical of her wariness around what, to all appearances, was a petite woman who barely hit five feet on a good day. But Kaji knew. Shinobi were all about deception, and Shinomizu had been born deceptive. 

There was not an ounce of truth in her delicate appearance—her long nails were razor sharp and lacquered into hard claws, her long silky black hair was threaded through with ninja wire, and her height belied the strength of her lithe form. More than a deadly and graceful shinobi, however, Mukuro was a straight up psychopath in a village full of the broken and damned. 

This little piece of Hell took every bad thing traumatized children learned and honed it into a weapon, armor for their shinobi to wear. Paranoia, tendency towards isolation, a deep rooted suspicion of all people, and a quickness to violence were bundled up nice and tight in the Academy and then drilled in with that awful “exit exam”.

It was a waste of resources, though Kaji wouldn’t say anything out loud for fear of being labelled a dissident, to have children kill each other. The village respectfully disagreed with her values. Until she had met Mukuro, she had thought it was just the village. No real person could think this shit was working. 

Mukuro slam-dunked that notion into the trash when she slammed back a shot of whiskey, picked up the serving fork left on the tray of dango, and jammed it just far enough into the eye of the man next to her that when she twisted and yanked it out, the bundle of nerves came with it. 

The man had apparently been “rude to her”, which Kaji took to mean he’d been trying to feel her up, so she didn’t feel too bad for the man (except that his blood was staining her counter). What  _ did _ bother her was Mukuro’s reaction to the whole affair. Cold, calculating, not an ounce of pity nor rage in her eyes to show that she done what she did for any real, visceral reason. 

When a member of the man’s drinking group had called her out in mutilating a fellow shinobi and threatened to report her to the Hunter nins, Mukuro had fixed her dark, cold eyes on him and said: “Trash that cannot defend itself but insists on disgracing the name of our village is not fit to even linger in our gutters.” Here she paused, and then added, “filth,” as though the man was not already feeling like shit on someone’s shoe from the sheer disgust in her eyes.

It made Kaji shudder to remember it, not because of the gore, but because of the way she had looked. So assured, so certain her violence was righteous and her reasoning unimpeachable. 

Kaji had discovered that day that even the Bloody Mist had its true believers. 

Naturally, whenever Mukuro walked through her door, Kaji had to focus on keeping her pulse slow and her smile welcoming. 

“Welcome!” She chimed when the bell rang, and didn’t even miss a step when a glowering Shinomizu Mukuro hopped into a bar stool in a maneuver that would have been both funny and adorable if performed by a different human being.

Without preamble, the jounin spoke, “They’re giving me a fucking genin team.”

Kaji turned away, ostensibly to grab the bottles she needed to start mixing Mukuro’s usual drink. She let herself mouth  _ what the fuuuuuuuck  _ to the liquor cabinet. 

If she ever needed proof that the village officials just really, truly, did not give a shit about the children in their care, this was it. 

Shinomizu Mukuro, who had once offhandedly told her that she thought the Academy coddled its students too much, who told her she had slaughtered a room full of toddlers for reasons unclear simply because she was ordered to, and who ( _ oh yeah _ ) ripped out a man’s eye  **with a serving fork ** for getting too handsy—that Shinomizu Mukuro was going to be put in charge of three fresh genin.

Kaji turned back around and placed the mixed drink in front of her and said in a relatively normal voice, “Hey it can’t be all bad! You’re always going on about the direction the village is going in. Isn’t the point of teaching kids to make them run the way you want them to?”

“Kids are stupid,” Mukuro countered. “They haven’t seen shit, and they don’t know anything. At least my rookies can tell the pointy end of a kunai from their asses.”

Kaji grimaced, but in a way that could perhaps be a rictus smile. These kids were gonna die. What the  _ fuck  _ were the officials thinking? Did they pick her name out of a hat?? No sane human being makes the leap from “genin need a teacher” to “hey, Shinomizu Mukuro trains chunin captains, right?” without something seriously wrong with their brains.

Oh, wait, duh. She’d just been thinking about this—everyone in this village was fucking crazy.

“Well, maybe you can teach ‘em something, correct the shit the Academy shoves down their throats and make some decent shinobi,” Kaji tried. These kids didn’t know it, but she was saving their goddamn lives right now. “Think about it: three shinobi trained to your specifications? Who go on to train their own genin? You’ll be doing more to spread your techniques and heritage than even having a brat of your own.”

May the gods forbid that thought. Mukuro was, as far as Kaji knew, a full-on lesbian, but the mere idea that she might spawn little dead-eyed mini-Mukuros was enough for Kaji to break into a cold sweat.

Mukuro seemed to consider her words, swirling the replacement liquid Kaji had poured in her glass. Her thousand yard stare was more like a three thousand yard stare as she contemplated.

For a moment, the only noise was that of the hushed whispers of the other patrons.

Then Mukuro snorted and tossed back her second shot. 

“I guess if the little bastards  _ really _ bug me, I can just fake a mission accident.” 

Kaji’s smile felt like it was carved out of her face with a butcher knife.

“What the hell. I’ll give it a shot.”


	2. Killer, Killer, Kirakira

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Featured OC: Kirakira - genin - Village Hidden in Smoke - pre series timeline

Kirakira knew that she was not smart. She knew this because she was reminded every day by her mother, her tutors, and her peers, as though they thought she would forget. Sometimes, it was said in an admonishing tone to reprimand her for thinking too highly of herself. Sometimes, it was said in a warning tone when she was about to embark on a journey, literal or metaphorical, that would be overreaching herself. She was reminded, in the nexus where others’ understanding and judgment met her own ignorance and curiosity, that she was not very smart. Bordering on dull, if truth be told (and truth was often told when it concerned Kirakira).

Kirakira was aware that she did not understand social dynamics, nor could she recognize when she was being taunted or tricked. She was guileless and trusting, and this often came back to bite her when she was inevitably injured by a party she put her faith in. She didn’t learn from her mistakes, either. She made the same error in judgment again and again. Her homework, she’d discovered, could often be compared to a sheet from an earlier grade and, aside from differences in the questions, the answers almost suggested she’d learned nothing in the intervening years.

However, Kirakira  _ did _ learn some things, things she’d worked tirelessly to commit to memory. She knew not to trust her mother’s judgement for, as she reminded herself every morning and evening before she slept, her mother would lie if it pleased her. She also knew the faces and names of every person who entered and exited the village in the last four years, which was when she’d started observing and documenting old and new people. 

From these observations, Kirakira had learned a great deal about her village and about how much her life differed from the lives of those around her. Naturally foolish and inept individuals such as herself tended to quit school and work in a trade or in odd jobs to support their families. There was a place and time for unskilled labor. In her mother’s posh residence she was sandwiched between an imported rug worth more than her organs on the black market and the parade of tutors and teachers her mother hired to try and shake some excellence loose from her dullard daughter’s decaying skill. 

It became increasingly obvious that her mother’s attempts at education were not the typical state of being; her mother’s desire for Kirakira to take over the merchant empire her mother has painstakingly crafted were little more than fantasy, supported only by the fact that Kirakira was good at mathematics. The ability to keep track of large numbers and make complicated calculations on the fly was indeed an impressive feat, especially for one as base and imbecilic as she. 

However, Kirakira became more and more convinced that her path in life should not and could not be the one her mother desired. She examined the things she could reasonably do and the people she had watched and recorded for four years and decided the profession that most suited her was that of a soldier—a  _ shinobi _ . Without her mother’s permission or knowledge she enrolled in the classes at the Academy. 

As someone who had been struggling with children’s subjects in school for years, she was not bothered or ashamed to be twice the age of her fellow applicants. She merely committed herself to the memorization of numbers as they pertained to the shinobi arts: numbers could be assigned to hand signs to form logical strings to follow for ninjutsu (though she had no talent for molding chakra, it was plain to see); numbers made up the bulk of weapons training, when examined from a theoretical perspective; and physical training was simply the act of plugging variables into known equations that she drilled into her body with dedication and diligent practice. 

Kirakira was dumb enough, she knew, to keep working at something even when it was clear she would fail. So she embraced it. As the classes moved into dissecting the best ways to kill, she eagerly studied. She memorized the positions, mathematized points of entry and angles and necessary force. She was not very good at ninjutsu, or genjutsu, or even really taijutsu. 

What she was good at, she discovered, was killing. Where other students attempted to disarm and demoralize, Kirakira wasted no time in going straight for the throat. She was not smart enough, not skilled enough, to disable, and so she must kill. 

In the primal moment of Kill, or Be Killed, when the numbers are fixed in her mind and she can practically see where she needs to put her pipe to cause an aneurysm, Kirakira feels real. 

She feels powerful. 

She feels  _ important _ .

She feels wanted.


	3. scurry i - who

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Former ANBU Rat painstakingly adjusts to life outside of the corps, a world she has not seen since she was 13. Along the way, she must face the things that she has done in the line of duty, and the things that were done to her. With a little help, she might, just maybe, possibly, start to mend. 
> 
> part one of a series of snapshots of this, probably. Nezuko is one of the characters I like the most, because she is how I have explored the psychological toll of being a shinobi. TW for description of disassociation.

Rat faced the open locker as she toweled the remnants of her recent mission from her skin. The cool air against the bare skin of her torso caused goosebumps to break out among the lines of injuries old and new. It caused a prickling where it pulled at the myriad cuts and rashes from a hard day’s travel—dirt ground into her brown hair turning it into muddy strings, dirt that elsewhere had parted skin where it foolishly lay unprotected. 

She had hoped the sleeveless version of the ANBU uniform would allay some of the heat of the desert, but she merely ended up sandblasted  _ and _ uncomfortably hot. Well, discomfort came with the territory of occupying a body. She would just ignore it next time. Even now, the familiar feeling of a head stuffed with cotton had pushed the nicks and cuts from her mind. A dull tingle ran through her, like touching a live wire.

She stared into the middle distance, the muted woman in the cracked locker mirror just a blob of brown and black in a sea of encroaching darkness. The towel brushed over injury and skin, heedless of damage in its quest to remove the bits of tissue that clung like nettles. 

“Rat.” A voice called. Her head snapped to the side, eyes finding him instantly. Bear, mask up on his head as he picked his way through the groaning remains of her team. “You good?”

“Functional.”

“Great,” he said, sounding as thoroughly enthused as she’d ever heard him—that is, not at all. “Solo debrief, Hokage, 10 minutes.”

With his message delivered, Bear spun on his heel, casually snatching one of her injured cohorts by his collar and bearing him (ha.) away to the medical lab that was his domain. Technically, all ANBU were required to know at least first aid, and medical ninjutsu was considered a valuable asset to any animal-hopeful. The gap between ideal and reality was only too apparent, and had been widening since the Princess left them behind.

She looked back towards the mirror, but the position felt off. She couldn’t slide back into the headspace she’d had, and she couldn’t sharpen into mission clarity. She felt offset, her _self _just a bit above the outline of her body. She floated to her feet and dragged her body along the tether of her mind. 

She was clean enough that dumping the pitcher of water over her head got most of the dirt and streaks of blood to wash to the floor, where it would inch along grout towards the drain in the middle of the room. Crane made a noise of distress when he saw the water was gone, but she tossed him the pitcher with the force of a kunai, over her shoulder and without looking back.

The smack of it hitting his palm and his quiet curses chased her out of the room. He was mobile; he could get more water. She didn’t want to walk into the Hokage’s office covered in mission gunk.

She secured the ANBU mask over her face, feeling its familiar bumps and lines, a raised snout and the three shallow gouges at either side that mimicked whiskers. She pushed herself back into her body and sealed herself in. The impression of the airtight seal coming to life as her own chakra network completed the circuit, the steady pressure of bone on skin, the shape of the world through the mask’s eyes—Rat never felt more real than when the mask was on. 

The jaunt to the Hokage Tower was not a difficult one, nor was it particularly long. The ANBU had tunnels throughout the village through which they could traverse, and as she scurried around pipes and between beams, she let the sounds of foot traffic and haggling voices wash over her. She rarely took to the rooftops, preferring instead to jump between hidey-holes and plunge into tunnels. 

It was a lesson she had learned as a rookie: ANBU were necessarily the shadows of the village, spilling private blood so their public face could beam proudly in the world. The Leaf refused to allow its genin and chunin, the bulk of the corps, to take part in the more unsavory missions. Despite this, they had to accept those contracts that arose or else sacrifice valuable resources to another village. Someone had to do it, and it might as well fall to them.

They had been formed as a hit squad in the early years of the Second’s Reign. With the assassination attempts on his brother in mind, Lord Tobirama had assigned a handful of elite ninja to be his guard detail. 

He created the masks and the animal personas of the original guard to mimic the traditional zodiac. His logic was that, as a leader, he could not be seen dispatching his own assassins; it would harm the face he showed the village as well as open him up for accusations and criticism from their enemy villages, no matter how baseless. The nameless, faceless specters of his Assassination Squad were harder to blame—they were a pit trap that foreign shinobi blundered into, rather than enemies to defeat. 

They fought for no village glory, took home to their Clans no prestige, and in their total emptiness they were terrifying to a world used to the names of legends bandied about as threats. Their soulless, bone-white masks became the first boogeyman of the shinobi world. Not many village would acknowledge it, but Tobirama’s kill squad shook them.

Over time, the ANBU grew in number and scope, first taking “preemptive” action to eliminate possible assassins and then becoming enmeshed in the rooting out of homegrown issues. That is, they put down coups, silenced dissidents before they could speak, and viciously hunted down those who broke the shinobi rules, particularly those who abused their positions by harming civilians.

This second wave, for lack of a better term, was what people thought of when they pictured the ANBU. The brutality and ruthlessness of their actions was shocking, even among shinobi. 

The family leadership of the various Clans had demanded the activity be scaled back, at least within the village walls, and stood firm in their first real act of solidarity until Tobirama conceded and created the Konoha military police, to be spearheaded by the leader of the opposition, the Uchiha. The Torture and Interrogation Corps was formed quickly after, and featured the faces of highly regarded Clanspeople from the Yamanaka, the Aburame, and the Nara. With the bureaucratisation, it was thought that these two faculties would be more accountable. 

(It was difficult to say if this had been his goal all along. Tobirama’s mind and motives were mysteries even to his generation.)

The ANBU remained in a diminished capacity, once again merely the Assassination unit of the Hokage, the only flank of the entire Shinobi populace that responded directly to the Hokage’s orders and no other. Their activities now seemed benign in comparison to what they’d done before, and thus the faceless shadows of the Leaf Shadow himself were cemented into the Village structure. 

Her fingers caught on a latch, and she twisted about so she could zip through the space it opened. The panel slid back in place silently. A frisson of chakra vibrated through her, at once speeding her body and slowing her mind as she seamlessly transitioned into a Body Flicker. 

She loved the fraction of a second where her breath seemed to suspend in her lungs. The feeling of her chakra bouncing off the wall, rebounding into her, and colliding with other chakra, then repeating, as she launched off the wall was a delicious fuzz at her toe tips.

It ended in an exhalation, spent chakra kicking up smoke as she landed on one knee, head bowed, in the office of her Lord and Master.

“I was summoned, my Lord,” she intoned, washing the traces of exhaustion from her voice. It left the sound hollow and echoing in her mask. 

“ANBU Rat,” the old man acknowledged. “I trust you are in fine health despite the unseen dangers of your jaunt in the Sand.”

It was not a question, but she nodded her agreement anyway.

“You are in one piece, at least,” he chuckled to himself, smoke wafting lazily from his ornate pipe. “Please rise.”

She did as she was bid.

“Rat,” he said, and then he sighed. “Jounin Nezuko, please remove your mask.” 

It had been a long time since anyone had called her “jounin”, not “ANBU”. She’d almost forgotten her official rank. It had been even longer since someone had said her  _ name _ . She almost flinched to hear it aloud. 

With the barest hint of hesitation and hands that did not shake, Rat pulled the mask off her face. It felt as though her head were following its chasing it, and she remained like that, self half hanging out of her body as she clipped the mask to her belt. 

“Nezuko, reporting for duty as instructed, Lord Hokage,” she heard a woman say, and realized the woman was her. 

“Nezuko, Rat… Nezuko,” he seemed to struggle to choose which name to call her. Though she knew which she preferred, she would not presume to tell her Hokage what to address his subordinate as.

“I have been speaking with your senior-most field captain and your medic. Your squad has a high success rate, and of those active in foreign lands, you continuously report the most accurate and actionable intel.”

Rat nodded to show that she was listening, patiently waiting for the reason behind this meeting to become clear.

“Your performance in particular is exemplary. I am informed that you have never missed a check-in.” As he spoke, he shifted some papers on his desk. He peered down at them with the squint. “And you have never taken leave. Nezuko.” 

He paused, looking up at her with tired eyes. “You have not taken leave in five years, since you were thirteen.”

“I am very healthy, sir,” she confirmed. She had never had more than a 24-hour cold, and it had easily been dealt with in between missions. 

“You have not taken time to visit friends or family or go on vacation.”

“I have no family, and my friends are all in my squad.”

He leveled a disbelieving look her way. 

“We’re all friendly acquaintances,” she hedged. 

“Are there any friends with whom you can interact with  _ outside _ of work?” 

It was against protocol to meet up with ANBU squad mates on off hours, since it would too obviously highlight who was actually ANBU and who was not. Unless they had a reason to meet unmasked, they did not. 

Rat hesitated, and then shook her head. 

He let out a long, loud sigh. A waterfall of smoke rolled off the papers on his desk. 

“Nezuko, jounin, trusted ANBU agent, what do you  _ fight _ for?”

She was in too much control of herself to blink in surprise, but the question did throw her. What did she fight for? 

“Yourself, my Lord Hokage, and the village.”

“Everyone fights for the village, Nezuko. I expect that a patriot like you always has the village in mind. But that is duty. Personally, Nezuko, who do you fight for? Whose face do you picture when you think of the village, of the people you protect?”

Rat tried to call up a face as he had asked, but she found only the blurry, half-melted in shadow vision of her own face she’d stared through in the locker room.

“I…” she tried to respond, but found she had no words. 

She wanted to say “I fight for myself” but couldn’t find it in her to lie to her superior officer. Maybe, at one point, it had been true. When she was young and fierce, with more teeth than she knew what to do with so she’d learned to bite back, hard. Now, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d burned with a need to  _ be _ , to show the world she  _ existed _ .

“Yes,” he said, and his voice was so terribly heartbroken. “Nezuko, jounin of Konoha, you are hereby removed from the ranks of the ANBU, and will resume your commission as a jounin of the village.”

Her stomach pooled in her feet.

Rat felt her teeth shaking, and she clenched them to avoid chattering in the presence of the Hokage. What could she say? He had just given her an order. 

“I… I thought my performance was acceptable.”

“It was, in a word, exemplary.”

“Then  _ why _ ?” Her voice cracked and broke on the word. She sucked in a breath and held it in her chest. She felt like she would drip into the floor; her head was so light she thought it might come off and float away like dandelion seeds.

He did not do her the dignity of pretending she was not coming apart. He leaned against his desk, staring into her eyes with the greatest care and concern. 

She felt bile rising in her throat.

Rat is ANBU, she thought desperately. Rat is ANBU! Nezu is Rat, Rat is ANBU! Nezu is Rat. She couldn’t stop the refrain now that it had started—and she stared into the Hokage as her brain spun in its hamster wheel.

“Your squad captain and medic both expressed concern for your health—your  _ mental _ health—,” he corrected when she was about to pounce on the falsehood. “They both informed me, separately and without consulting each other mind you, that although your performance was always commendable, you have been growing distant. You stare into space, mouth things to yourself, gnaw at your fingers until they bleed.”

She didn’t remember doing any of that, and yet she couldn’t really say she hadn’t. More and more, Rat had slid out of her body and let it do the work of day-to-day living while she sat in buzzing numbness. 

“Nezuko, my dear,” he added the epithet as though he wanted to hold her together, hold her attention for a few seconds more, “nothing good can come of an ANBU on the verge of a nervous breakdown serving any longer.”

She wished he had just cut her down with a blade, for all that it would hurt less. The numbness held her aloft, but she knew that like the hyperfocus of battle, the injury would hurt all the worse when it faded.

“Nezuko, you have leave built up. As your superior officer, and as someone who cares for your wellbeing, I am ordering you to take it. For three months you will not act in any official capacity. You will be paid a stipend, of course, until you resume mission work  _ as a jounin _ .” 

No ANBU. No mask. No Rat. No Rat. No Rat.

Rat is ANBU, she thought desperately. Nezu… Nezuko felt the full weight of a name she had not properly carried in years, an age old hurt scraping the hollow of her insides.

“You are dismissed, Nezuko- _ chan, _ ” he said, using the honorific again as though it would bandage her tattered psyche. “Boar will ensure you get home.” 

She felt the large man appear behind her, silent as a whisper and solid as he always was. She might have tipped backwards, because his rough-gloved hands came up to capture her shoulders—trapped, caged.

She didn’t dare breath, lest she begin to scream. Once she started, she wouldn’t stop.

She left, leaving the mask with the Hokage. Leaving Rat.

_ Who am I? _

Rat is ANBU.

_ I’m not ANBU. _

“Nezu,” the rumble of her one-time squadmate pushed her up above the waves just enough to see that there was a door in front of her. She didn’t recognize it but was vaguely aware that she’d probably lived her at some point. 

She reached out, hand missing the knob and pressing against the peeling white wood. She was so heavy. She slumped against it, head hanging and eyes unseeing. 

“Did you know?” Her mouth moved.

“No. Yeah. Kinda.”

She let her hand slide down to the knob and twisted it. It was unlocked, and she wondered if she’d left it open all those years ago. When she first left for basic ANBU training and lived in the barracks, where she’d simply chosen to stay. She knew, abstractly, that she had never stopped the rent payments taken out of her check every month.

She stumbled inside and fell onto an old couch. Dust billowed up around her and she coughed. Her eyes stung with the particulates, and she screwed them shut. 

Far away, Boar closed the door quietly and locked it.


	4. Return, or all birds know how to fly home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In a family that loved them more, or in a world that cared more for two wayward souls, they might have died with the rest.

Guard duty was rarely interesting. Some of the farther outposts, like those on the border, saw action or halted thieves and counterfeiters. Stations a little closer often served as waypoints or standby stations for incoming or outgoing shinobi, so at least there were good stories. Here in the village, at the main gate, the most exciting thing was the occasional overturned merchant’s cart and a very slow, very angry pileup. 

On the whole, returning shinobi rarely even used the main gate. Mostly, it was genin and their teachers that set off from here. Teams of chunin or single jounin tended to hop the wall at the southern or western ends, since those points were more weakly defended and could benefit from a surprise appearance. 

In the dead heat of summer when the cicadas screamed and the clouds refused to block out the sun, there were few, if any, merchants coming in to hawk their wares in the market. Despite usually liking the easy work load and the opportunity to see new faces, Kotestu could honestly say front gate duty was a _slog._

In the heat of the summer evening, his eyes drifted closed. Not to sleep, but just because the sun felt good on his eyelids and bad in his eyes. 

A cool shadow fell over him. The tingle of trained chakra, and the fact that he didn’t hear any footsteps said right away that it was a shinobi. He didn’t bother to open his eyes, which felt more and more like they were glued shut. Shinobi at the front gate meant either genin team or a mission that required a check in, so travel papers and passports.

“Papers?” He sighed.

“Ah,” a voice in front of him said. “I… don’t think we have any? I don’t think we even _got_ any.” There was a sound of shifting fabric, as she presumably looked through pockets and bags. 

A woman’s voice, he thought, or a high-pitched man’s. It was in a comfortable middle where it could be either. He didn’t recognize the voice immediately, but he didn’t see some shinobi enough to know their voices. Just like it wasn’t impossible for a shinobi to not have travel papers. Missions were rough, and shinobi often came back in pieces. It was too much to expect their visas would fare better. 

He stood from the chair and finally opened his eyes to pull a binder from the shelf. He flipped it open to the day’s log, where parties due to return would have been noted by paperwork nins. “Registration number?”

“Double oh-six-four-seven and oh-eleven-two-oh-three.” 

00647 and 011203? Talk about generation gaps. He snuck a glance behind him at the person (people) and saw that there was indeed a small shadow of a woman at the elbow of a much taller, much broader woman. 

Standing side-by-side, their similar long black hair and facial structures seemed to indicate familial relation, but the taller one wore an unusual, reflective visor that folded over her head from nose to crown. He could only see a pair of lips, fixed in a smirk that seemed habitual. She was built in a way that spoke to heavy strength training, which explained the giant crossbow of which he could just barely see the arms at her back. She wore a simple, rusty red tunic—sleeveless, which was respectable with _those_ arms—that seemed like it had armoring sewn in. Two war fans sat in holsters on belts that criss-crossed over her hips.

She saw him looking, and her smirk grew into something sharper. It almost reminded him of a hawk. 

He quickly moved his eyes to the smaller and, most likely, the younger of the two. This one was svelte and short, especially in the shadow of her Amazonian companion. She wore a simple blue kimono dress under a breastplate. Like the other, she carried a weapon on her back—a blade whose hilt he could see and whose position suggested a long blade with serious reach. Her face was beautiful but so blank he couldn’t see anything at all her dark eyes. 

He gave them a nervous smile.

Kotestu broke the awkward silence by clearing his throat and turning back to the logbook. “I don’t see your numbers in the mission log for this week—”

“Oh, duh,” the same voice said quietly, to herself. Then, louder: “Long term assignment, surveillance mission in the Outer Lands. Fulfilled to judgement. Thirteen years.”

He nearly fumbled the binder he was putting back. Thirteen years? He snuck another look, but each was still as opaque as the other. If anything, they were more impassive than before, looking at each other (he presumed since he couldn’t see the older one’s eyes) and seemingly communicating in lip angles and widening eyes.

Well, with thirteen years alone together in the unmapped territories, it was to be expected they would understand each other in a look. Given the probable family connection, they had to be practically telepathic at this point.

“Welcome home, shinobi, and thank you for your service!” he said, using an archaic welcome that rarely came into conversation anymore. Simply leaving the village wasn’t as much of a danger as it had been in previous generations, but they’d been away so long and so far afield that they deserved a proper greeting.

The visor-wearer broke out in a full blown grin and bowed. The younger bowed as well after the barest moment, lower than the other. An apprentice, maybe? Definitely paying attention to respectful behavior. Man, if she’d kept that up those thirteen years, she had way more discipline than him. 

Maybe it was just because they were back in the village, among those who would notice their relationship to each other?

“We are glad to render service to our honorable village,” the woman answered with the traditional phrase, which was even less used than the greeting. Then again, she was apparently from the double-oh generation, so maybe it was more ingrained in her than him. 

He reached under the desk and pulled out a box that, judging by the layer of dirt caked in top, hadn’t been opened in a few years. He lifted the lid and covered his nose to avoid the wave of dust that puffed up from the documents within. He withdrew a much older binder from this tomb and flipped it open. 

Those missions assigned so long ago that lasted so long and had yet to be marked complete were so rare, he didn’t need the exact date. He found the page quickly—a picture of the woman, presumably thirteen years younger though god forbid she _shows_ it, who had apparently taken her jounin profile photo in the same visor. Below her official photo was a little girl’s head, obviously cut from a larger image. Beside each was written their registration numbers, general descriptions of appearance, and a short mission summary.

As in, very short. 

“Reconnaissance,” it read, “long distance surveillance of Outer Lands. Periodic check in. To be completed on jounin’s judgment. Assigned by: Namikaze Minato (Fourth Hokage). Addendum: apprentice to accompany. Same mission. 

Seeing it was a punch in the gut. He probably should have put it together, given that the village had been in a much different state thirteen years ago. Kotetsu has been young when the Fox tore through the village from beyond the walls, each snap of its tails a gale that cut and each step an earthquake that toppled buildings. The moment had been so terrifying it was still carved into the back of his eyelids. Like so many, he could close his eyes and see it all as it was.  
  
He looked at them and realized that these kunoichi had left the village a year before the attack even happened. Had their check-ins been two-way, or just drop-offs? Did they know the man who assigned them their mission had been dead and buried for twelve years? 

He couldn’t comprehend the enormity of the revelation they would receive, but he knew it was probably above his pay grade. With a wobbly smile, he said, “You’ve got quite a bit to catch up on.” 

The elder barked a laugh. “Isn’t that the truth? I wonder what our esteemed family has gotten up to in our absence, eh, Hitomi?”

The younger nodded, a small but contemplative frown on her face. Her eyes were flinty steel. 

He thanked the gods he could assign this mission to a different shinobi. With a flick, he produced a notepad from his pocket and scribbled a few numbers: codes for different procedures that would be necessary for their reintegration. 

“R-right, you’re gonna have to check in with, uh, with the Hokage,” he said, wincing. “I’ll get you an escort. Uh, what were your names?”

While it was common practice to only list registration numbers in order to avoid bias in report collation, it was annoying for literally anything else. 

“Uchiha, Mai, and Uchiha, Hitomi,” the elder answered. 

He dropped his pen.

“Mission complete! Returning for duty!” She said cheerfully, unhindered.

He swallowed around the lump in his throat, revising that ‘break the hard news’ mission from D to A. This could only end in fire and tears. 

That was how it was with the Uchiha Clan. 


	5. return, or falling from the nest

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hitomi does not know these people, and never did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> C-c-c-combo!

Hitomi’s hands were clenched in her lap, her eyes resolutely lowered in a gesture of respect. Her memories of this place were a distant, hazy adolescent fog, one that pricked her breast sharply when she thought of it. The cold in her mouth tasted like inferiority, like too cold to burn and to different to be anything good. 

Her knuckles were white, her body rigid. The elder behind the desk was not someone she recognized, not even the towheaded man she vaguely recalled bowing before while Mai demanded she be allowed to come with her. Mai had said “mission” but Hitomi was almost sure she heard the word “escape”. 

Mai explained the world in ways that made sense. Things often had to be couched in other language, softened with pillows of flowery adjectives, and sheathed in white-lies. Everyone lies constantly, Mai assured her, because it was a tool for lubricating social encounters. Things could go that much smoother if you just didn’t tell the merchant they were using the lemons to to get blood stains out of their undergarments, for instance. 

The rule of thumb she’d been given was to keep all extraneous information to herself, unless it was absolutely vital to share. Hitomi had taken that to mean her customary silence was not the wrong choice, and kept all she knew close to her heart. Only Mai drew secrets from her lips like water from a well. Silence was the best choice, with her skills.

Hitomi wasn’t very good at lying, despite what Mai called “a devastating poker face”. She couldn’t quickly connect the threads of deception and weave the tangled webs of intertwining stories Mai could. 

Mai was both so much like her and so different. She was like a legendary hero, like the great First Hokage who founded the village or his granddaughter Lady Tsunade. She had saved Hitomi, scooped her up from the wreckage of a shattered home that had been grinding her into dust. Although Mai was a wildfire fit to make any of their brethren weep in jealousy, they had despised her and said nasty things behind her back. 

For the longest time, she’d only known her “as the blue-eyed half-breed who left the compound” who was somehow both too arrogant and looked down on them while she was worthless and unfit to be among them. It seemed to Hitomi that those who mentioned her wanted her to be among them so she could be properly degraded. She felt an aching kinship in that moment, one that stretched farther than blood. When the woman herself had set foot in the compound for the first time since making chunin, Hitomi had glommed onto her and refused to let go. 

Take me away, she’d cried inside, too torn up to force the words out. Her watery dark eyes stared back at her from the nacreous visor. Then, the woman had smiled at her, scooped her into her arms like mothers held the other children sometimes. With Hitomi on her hip, she had barged into the sanctum of the Uchiha and informed (informed!) them that she would be leaving on a long, secret mission from the Hokage and that Hitomi would be coming with her as her apprentice.

Well, her exact words had been “and I’m taking this kid, so buzz off, and no Kaname-san you may  _ not _ veto my decision, thank you very much.”

Then, she spun on her heel and left, a shocked group of old men in her wake. 

Since that day, Mai had fulfilled her unspoken promise. She had treated Hitomi like a person who needed guidance and provided what guidance she could. What she couldn’t teach herself, she found teachers for. She thought the light dancing in Hitomi’s fingers was, in her words, “the coolest shit”. 

With Mai at her side, she learned how to breath like a person who knew they deserved to breath. She learned to swing a sword, to call forth lightning with a single sign, to  _ dance _ . Because Mai, of course, knew how to dance. And together, they played a symphony of harmonious slaughter. They had ripped through hordes of bandits and mercenaries, earning cash as a shinobi ought to, even in lands where shinobi were not so common. 

Hitomi risked a glance up to take in Mai’s expression. She had removed her visor to speak with the Hokage, and her blue eyes were not nearly as warm as her smile. Her jaw was tight and a muscle flickered across it when the old man asked a question.

“No, we never encountered him. I’ve never seen Mikoto and Fugaku’s first son, nor their second.” Her voice was so cold. 

Hitomi breathed out, the crackle of lightning in her veins almost loud enough to drown out his reply. 

“We will have to place the village in high alert, in case your reappearance inspires Itachi to return and complete the task he set for himself.”

Her whole family. All the aunts and uncles who frowned in disapproval when she couldn’t so much as cough up smoke. All the cousins, so many cousins, who wouldn’t play with her because she wasn’t quite right. 

Her parents. Hitomi’s breath caught in her chest. The hitch had Mai’s attention back on her, though Mai remained resolutely forward. She could feel her elder cousin’s awareness, and she deepened her breathing once more. 

Hitomi… did not know how she felt. She couldn’t identify the beast prowling in her chest, nor the reason behind the tightening in her chest or the relaxing of her shoulders. These were the minute signals her body tried to give her, and seemingly only Mai had ever successfully translated. 

“You’re absolutely sure the rest are dead? No ‘surprises’ like us?”

“No one else has your unique confluence of mission secrecy, distance, and detachment from the family, I’m afraid. I’ve had chunin pulling records, and your name doesn’t appear in any documentation of the Clan’s aside from the family register.”

Mai snorted. “I’m surprised I’m in  _ there _ , to be honest. You know how my family feels about bastards.”

A pause. “Felt. Damn it.”

“I’m so sorry this terrible news has to reach you this way, Jounin Mai, and so long past due.”

“And Hitomi?”

Hitomi snapped to attention, spine even straighter than before, but Mai was asking about her, not asking her. 

“Hitomi’s records end as a child. It’s easy to assume she died, from what is left of the Uchiha family records. There’s no way Itachi would have known either if you were alive and away.”

“I’m assuming Uchiha not in the village were also hunted down and killed?”

“Yes, in the days following the massacre. The village sent out a high security alert, but unfortunately…”

“It just funneled them into Itachi’s hands,” Mai guessed, grimly. “No Uchiha would go to ground when their family was in peril.” 

There was perhaps a note of derision in her voice. Regardless, the Hokage hummed in agreement. “We cannot assume your escape was a voluntary exception on Itachi’s part, like that of young Sasuke. It is possible he may return to kill you.” His eyes settled on Hitomi, seated  _ seiza _ behind and to the right of her master, sword lain parallel to her body beside her. “Both of you.”

_ Let him try,  _ Hitomi thought.  _ Let him come for us, and let him know the folly of facing down the storm.  _

There was nothing they could not confront together. She raised her chin, silently defiant.

“We will place you in the household of the Main House, with young Sasuke. If Itachi does return, it will be useful to know the path he will take.”

_ We’re bait _ , Hitomi realized glumly. 

“Is Sasuke the current Clan Head?”

There was a pause that seemed… not startled, but perhaps off-balance.

“No, the Headship, like the vast majority of the Clan funds and assets, have been placed on lockdown until Sasuke comes of age.”

“Oh, no, that won’t do, my Lord,” Mai said. Hitomi could hear the edge of a smirk in her tone. She also recognized the softening of a blow with a respectful address. Mai was about to Do Something. 

“I hereby take the mantle of Clan Head, as is my right as the eldest surviving Uchiha. I declare now with you as my witness, Lord Hokage, and you, Uchiha Hitomi, that neither the office nor associated funds will be abused and that, should he wish it, the Headship will transfer to Uchiha Sasuke as the remaining heir of the previous Head upon his twentieth birthday or attainment if jounin rank, whichever comes first. In the intervening time, I will exercise the political and social power of the Uchiha and maintain Clan finances.” 

She paused to breath. 

“Did I miss anything?”

The Hokage, whose face until now had been so sympathetic and open, closed up like a fan. She recognized the look of a man who had badly misjudged his opponent and needed to pull back to regroup and rethink.

“Now, let’s talk estates.” 

Mai did not believe in allowing her targets any room to breathe.

Hitomi smiled with all her teeth. 


	6. return, or fanning the flames on beating wings

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mai smells a rat.

The house was not on fire, but Mai thought she saw it smoldering anyway. The dying embers of a hearth that once burned bright cast their smoky pallor upon everything in sight. She had stopped in the house of her mother, and taken note of the condition it was in. 

The blood and bodies had long been cleaned, but the house itself still carried the ghost of combat. There was a slash through a paper sliding door, at the height of a man’s throat. She traced along the line, envisioning the force of the blow and the height of the attacker. He’d been just thirteen. 

Just thirteen? She must be getting old, if she could look at children who were twice the age she had been when she first set foot on a battlefield and see  _ just children _ . She followed the line of cleared carnage up the stairs, into the room that must have belonged to her mother’s mother. The hole in the floor indicated where there had once been a person, impaled, perhaps while laying in a futon.

The traces of poorly cleaned blood dripped from the room, the line of blood along a katana, so drunk and unclean between cuts. He must have decided that cleaning the blood after the strike was an exercise in futility. Had he been soaked, head to toe, in arterial spray and gore? 

She could imagine the bloody work, could see fields of war so soaked that the dirt turned to mud, could smell a stench so foul it could never be forgotten. The insides of a person spilled to the ground, and the rot of human hatred worked out in sweat and chakra.

Bloody  _ fucking _ work. 

She followed him through the halls. He must have dashed, given the spacing of the splatters, though she couldn’t be sure when it had been partially cleaned away. Maybe he simply stumbled here, and the flicker of the blade in his wheeling arms placed a half moon of his and her own blood against the wall. 

Had he gotten tired at all? A thirteen year old, running from house to house, silencing cousin after cousin, aunts and uncles. He must have. Had he paused here, against the wall, breathing ragged with the work of it all. He had used a blade and genjutsu, Hiruzen said. Surmised. 

Mai pressed against the paper wall so hard her nails punctured it. 

She slid open her mother’s bedroom door, coming face to face with the woman, a smear of hatred across her face. Mai breathed in sharply, before she realized she was seeing ghosts and banished the image from her mind. The hatred was old and gone, dead and buried like the bitch herself. 

There was a scorch mark across the wall. A jutsu that had gone wide. Itachi had got to her soon enough to redirect her shot. She could picture the lock maneuver, and the quick jerk that broke her arm in three places. She mimed the slide of blade with one of her  _ tessen _ . Up through the ribs, piercing through lungs and heart. The blood would have dropped back down… and again.

Another blood splatter out of place. The remnants of her mother’s blood were flung to the far facing wall. It implied the cutting of an artery, or a far more forceful blow than one that could be executed from any arm lock. Perhaps, if the attacker had appeared behind her, somehow, he could have grabbed her arm, wrenched it and sliced her neck in the same motion…

Again, she halted. Again, it wasn’t right. Mai was about six feet tall, huge for a woman, and big even for the men of Fire country—thanks to her bastard father no doubt. 

The height of this strike was higher than the strike that had killed the man on the floor below. Unless he had grabbed her and slit her neck while executing a jump, Itachi was not capable of both killings. 

She pushed her visor to the top of her head and, for just a moment, activated her Sharingan. The room snapped into crisp lines, faintly traced in the chakra that permeated shinobi dwellings, the remnants of generations of jutsu and growth. Her eyes confirmed what she had already intuited.

The angle was wrong. Again.

She’d checked five houses before she’d gathered the courage to venture into her mother’s house. With the flashbulb imprints of her sharingan recorded memories, she knew that the issue was consistent throughout the locations she’d visited. 

In one or two houses, she might have thought extenuating factors or missing elements accounted for the difference. In the fifth, she was suspicious. The smell of rot was heavy in the air, but it wasn’t the degrading houses. 

Hitomi was waiting patiently in the yard, examining the pink pinwheel that was still planted there, still spinning in the breeze. She reached out and put a hand on Hitomi’s shoulder as she passed, giving it a little squeeze. 

Hitomi. Her dear cousin, her younger sister in all but heritage. They had both known the sharp edge of the blade the Uchiha wielded to cut themselves off from those who might know and love them. Mai’s mother had been destroyed by love, and she in turn destroyed all she touched. If love was so destructive and hateful, was it really even love at all?

Mai loved Hitomi. She had from the moment the girl had caught her by the leg and screamed her sorrow with damning silences. But Hitomi had tangles inside that she hadn’t worked through. Unlike Mai, she hadn’t made the cleanest break she could, after years of abuse and the realization that it was not her who was defective, but the world she lived in. 

Hitomi had been lifted from misery, but the misery had not been lifted from her. Maybe that was Mai’s fault. She had unilaterally made a decision for her as a child that had such vast consequences on her life and upbringing. Mai had tried to do her best by the girl, but Mai was a poor replacement for a good mother’s love. 

Hitomi trailed her, silent as a shadow, stopping outside of the places Mai wanted to get a look at. Most of the fighting had been confined indoors, which was astonishing to her. Had Itachi really been able to cast a genjutsu so strong, without eye contact, that it could mask the sound of death and the feeling of surging chakra? How had he cleared the whole district in the space of a single night with no one the wiser?

Mai knew she could probably do it, but her methods were very much not the silent, inconspicuous type. She’d often daydreamed about burning the district to the ground. She hadn’t necessarily imagined killing all of her relatives, but the wide scale destruction fit the roiling, impotent anger she held. She hated the system, the traditions that marked her as inferior.

Had Itachi’s hatred been so surgical, so personal? Why had he needed to see all of their faces? Did it assuage whatever worries he might have had about the righteousness of his actions? Or, as she suspected, had he killed only a handful, aided by one to three highly skilled fighters?

There were kills she thought he’d done. She didn’t think this was some cover-up, where Itachi was on the run from the real killers, but she also didn’t buy the shit Hiruzen was trying to sell her. 

“You’d think the man who sent me to war, twice, would learn not to underestimate me, but men live to disappoint me I guess,” she remarked to Hitomi. The sound of her voice was far too loud in the silence of a dead district.

“The killing is too concentrated to have been so silent,” Hitomi agreed. “Was the Lord Hokage lying about learning of the killings the following morning?”

“I wouldn’t doubt it,” Mai snorted. “Wouldn’t surprise me at all if they figured they’d just let us kill each other. But I’m more interested in why he felt the need to craft a narrative like that.”

Hitomi didn’t express her confusion in any way, not outwardly, but Mai had learned to read her silences for what they meant. 

“The whole ‘thirteen year old genius snaps and kills his whole family in a single night, leaving only his younger brother alive to experience the horror of it’ is certainly compelling if you’re writing a novel,” Mai explained, “but it’s hardly the product of an investigation.”

She paused, trying to remember which direction the Main House had been in. Hitomi, ever the bright one, pointed down the road they had to take. She patted her on the head and picked up the line of reasoning again.

“Hiruzen said there was no warning, but ANBU go through a battery of psychological exams. It’s one of the most taxing jobs in the village, and the amount of power and access ANBU wield means any cracks could fracture the village.”

Hitomi’s eyes flicked to the shoulder where Mai’s own ANBU tattoo was inked. The tattoo wasn’t really a known factor, since the spiral was a common decorative element in Konoha. What really marked it as ANBU was the tiny seals inscribed in ink, so dense they seemed to form a solid block of color. The seals didn’t really do anything besides be insanely hard to duplicate and allow for identification of ANBU agents without removing their masks. Hell, hers probably wasn’t even active anymore. 

“Yes, I’m drawing on prior knowledge, and yeah, my info could be outdated,” Mai acknowledged. “But if they stopped testing ANBU for emerging madness, I think was have bigger problems than our kid cousin being a genocidal psychopath.”

“He’s older than me,” Hitomi reminded her. 

“My kid cousin. Your older cousin. That takes so much longer to say, Hitomi.”

“I’m sorry.” She sounded sorrowful too, which was the damnedest thing.

“Never be sorry for keeping me honest, kid.”

Hitomi visibly brightened, a small smile on her face. Practically a grin in any other person. Mai reached over and pulled her into a one-armed hug. Casual affection wasn’t really “the Uchiha Way” but they both needed physical reminders that the other was there, sometimes. 

And Mai hated to do anything that might make her ancestors proud.

They walked like that, a bit awkwardly since Hitomi seemed inclined to stay under her wing, until the largest house on the street came into view. It was not decorated in signs of wealth like the Hyuuga Main House, for instance, but was clearly the most high quality materials, and it was the best maintained. 

She tried the door and found it unlocked. Locks were rarely helpful when shinobi were involved.

Inside, there was a stifling air. Bits and pieces of the house obviously saw daily use. The stove was stocked with supplies, the sink had dishes piled inside, the laundry room had fresh detergent, and one of the bedrooms had been used. Everything else was untouched, preserved like a specimen in formaldehyde. It was eerie. 

A boy living among the dead.

Hitomi had placed herself at the kitchen table and begun the process of caring for her blade. Mai joined her, dropping the crossbow beside her chair and fanning herself with one of the war fans.

“I don’t like it here,” Hitomi said, so quiet it was nearly incomprehensible. For her to speak up at all meant her skin must be crawling.

“Too many bad memories,” Mai agreed. “Old and new.”

The only sound for a moment was the whetstone against the steel of her sword. Then, the sound of quick footsteps was approaching at a decent clip. She judged the weight and height of the runner on the sound, and fluttered her war fan dismissively at Hitomi’s crackling fingers.

The last Uchiha had arrived.


	7. birds in bushes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sasuke.   
return, or birds in the bushes

Of course he didn’t bother knocking. It was his house, no matter who was in it now. He threw open the front door and was confronted with the strange sight of two pairs of shoes in his entryway. Both sets were regulation blue sandals, one a good deal bigger than the other. He found that his own pair fit snugly between them in size. 

Placing his shoes down beside theirs provoked a sense of emotional vertigo. He could remember doing the same thing when his father and brother were home before him, rare as that was. For a moment, he was back in his younger body, trying so hard to make his shoes as straight and neat as theirs. But there was no third set in a woman’s size off to the side, muddy with dirt from their garden, and these didn’t belong to his brother or father.

They were strangers’ sandals, regardless of any shared blood.

Thirteen years, the Hokage had said. They’d been gone longer than he’d been alive. What even was their relationship to him? They were in the family register but that was the only document recording their existence. They’d never met him, never met That Man, never even seen many of those who had died that day. 

They were family and he wanted so desperately to see them as such, to have someone to teach him what he would have learned from his father, his mother. He just couldn’t stop thinking about what the Hokage had said.

“ _ These kunoichi have been gone for a very long time. Uchiha Mai served in the Second and Third Shinobi World Wars, and Hitomi has been her apprentice since the age of six. Both are presumably highly skilled combatants with whom we have had no contact. I must ask you to err on the side of caution; family or no, they may be dangerous rogue agents.” _

He had wanted to protest. Didn’t the old man understand? Of course he didn’t, he’d never lost his whole family in one night. These people, these kunoichi, however far removed from him, were clanswomen. They would  _ understand.  _ But he remembered the flash of steel and the bleeding red of That Man’s eyes in the shadows, the stench of death in his nostrils.

Family could betray. Family could kill. And these weren’t trusted siblings, these were  _ strangers _ .

Sasuke braced himself, checked that his weapons were still on him, and strode into his childhood home. 

“Oh, good,” he was greeted immediately. “I was starting to wonder if you were just gonna stand out there all day.”

The woman who spoke was the eldest and she was far larger than he thought she’d be. Probably taller than his sensei if she stood, with broad shoulders and a languid smile on painted lips. He could see nothing  _ but _ the smile beneath a milky white visor, save the long black hair that pooled on the floor behind her. She lounged with a cat’s grace at his table.

Across from her sat the other, ramrod straight as though she were sitting through a tea ceremony, rather than simply sharpening a blade at his table. The sword was long, longer with a black metal hilt, and had obviously seen use. Her hands stilled when he appeared, and she stared fixedly at his face as though trying to read his mind. Her face looked a lot like his. A lot like his mother’s. 

If he had doubted these two were related to him, that fact alone banished the thought from his mind. They were  _ Uchiha _ .

The elder, relaxed where the younger was tensed like a string about to snap, gestured to the chair across the table with a lazy wave. “It’s gonna be really awkward trying to talk while craning my neck. Sit down, kid. Let’s talk.”

Ignoring the brazen invitation to sit down in his own home, it was a blatant lie. She didn’t have to lean back to look at him because she was so tall. He didn’t sit but he did walk around the table, keeping them in his field of vision. 

“Uchiha Sasuke,” he said, introducing himself as his mother would bid him to do. It was rude to ask for someone’s name without first giving his own. They all probably knew each other’s names already, but there was something to be said for manners.

“Uchiha Mai,” the eldest answered, followed by a very soft “Uchiha Hitomi” from her companion.

“But you already knew that,” Mai continued, waving her closed fan dismissively. It was a beautiful black fan, metal all the way through, and he suspected there were blades hidden between the panels. A war fan, he surmised, and its partner sat at her hip in a holster. Both women, he noticed, had their weapons before them—the enormous crossbow that sat beside Mai at the table and the long, slender blade of Hitomi’s sword. He wondered if it was a conscious decision to make him feel more at ease.

Shinobi didn’t have to have weapons to be deadly, though, and both women were likely fast enough to rearm themselves before he even managed to take a threatening step. He jammed his hands into his pockets, eyeing each carefully, but they didn’t move one way or the other. 

“So,” he started and then stopped.

Because what could he say? How did he even begin to cover the enormity of what lay between them? He wanted to ask how they felt, how they took the news. Were they calmer because they were older or because it had been so long since they’d seen their family that it was more akin to hearing an uncle that they’d never met had died? Who had they lost that night? Their parents? Their siblings? Mai was perhaps old enough to have children—had they perished?

How could he possibly ask them the questions he hated to hear from others? He couldn’t offer a platitude, not when the cavernous expanse of anguish yawned between them all so widely. 

“So,” Mai agreed. There was something softer in her voice. “How old are you? Twelve, thirteen?”

“Twelve,” he answered shortly.

She nodded, the visor catching the light from the kitchen window as it moved. He wondered if it was opaque all the way through or if it allowed her to see and not be seen.

“So you’re probably, what? A genin right now?” Mai asked, leaning back in her chair. She turned her head ever so slightly towards Hitomi. The younger woman, seeing her cousin’s look, simply shrugged.

Sasuke was hit with the strange realization that this was the kind of talk he’d had with aunts and uncles. “ _ You’re in the Academy now, Sasuke! Wow, you’re getting so big!” _

He swallowed down the bile rising in his throat and nodded, unwilling to risk his voice shaking. 

“Uh-huh, and you probably have a teacher, right? They give teachers to genin, right? I haven’t been gone  _ that _ long. Do you have a team?”

“Yeah,” he croaked. “Team Seven, under Hatake Kakashi.”

“Huh, I was Team Three, I think,” she said, flicking the fan open and lazily waving it through the air. “It’s been such a long time and we barely got to know each other. We were parted pretty quickly.”

He was about to ask why, but remembered what the Hokage had said. The Third War, and the Second. She would have made genin during the Second War, he thought, if he was reading her age right.

“Oh, right,” Mai said suddenly, and he realized she was looking at Hitomi. “Konoha is known for its efficient operative teams. We tend to put kids in groups to teach them to play nice with each other.” 

Hitomi nodded, face hardly moving. “We’re a team.”

Mai  _ beamed _ . “We are!”

The young woman turned to Sasuke and her fierce eyes held something that made his heart clench. “And we’re family.”

The pronouncement shook him. Mai even stopped smiling and glanced contemplatively between Hitomi and him. 

“Yes,” Mai spoke softly, her voice barely more than a whisper. “I suppose we are.”

The silence that descended was not awkward but companionable. Each seemed lost in their own thoughts or in observation of the thoughts that passed over them. It was the kind of silence that had lived in the kitchen when he sat at the table to do his homework and his mother did the dishes, quietly humming to herself.

He felt the prickle of tears at his eyes and shut them tight. He refused to cry.

“Oh, Sasuke,” Mai said quietly. Her mouth opened, but what she was about to say was lost when a familiar voice chimed in:

“Yo.”

His teacher was suddenly standing behind him and he had yanked the chair out from under the table and swung it at the man before he realized who it was. Kakashi dodged out of the way of the blow. He then gave Sasuke the most pitiable pout he’d ever seen. 

“And here I thought we were getting along.”

“You interrupted.”

Sasuke put the chair down, back to the table, and sat backwards on it, glancing at Hitomi as he did so. He wasn’t sure he could read her just yet—she was more unfathomable than Mai, and  _ she  _ was wearing a helmet—but he thought she looked annoyed, even angry.

“Maa,” his teacher said, rubbing the back of his head. Despite his tone, he didn’t seem all that contrite. “I wanted to make sure my grumpiest duckling was getting along with his cousins.”

“You didn’t knock. You just came in,” she continued, her eyes slightly wider and her nostrils flaring.

“Well, the door  _ was _ open…”

“And you interrupted Mai. She was going to ask an important question.”

Sasuke blinked. This was far more words than she’d offered him, but he didn’t get the feeling that was a good thing. If looks could kill (and they definitely, definitely could), Hitomi would have skewered Kakashi by now.

“Hitomi- _ chan _ ,” Mai said lightly, “it’s fine. There’ll be more time to talk about important things in the future. We should greet Sasuke’s teacher properly.”

Hitomi looked slightly shame-faced at her master’s direction. She quietly picked up her whetstone to continue sharpening her sword. Even so, she continued to stare Kakashi down with that eerily empty glare. 

“Hatake Kakashi,” Mai drawled. “Son of the White Fang, I’m guessing?”

“Hatake Sakumo, yes,” Kakashi answered. 

“And what has the son of the White Fang been teaching my little cousin?”

Kakashi pulled out that stupid orange book, seemingly uninterested in the conversation now. “Oh, a bit of this, a bit of that.”

He was  _ infuriating _ . Sasuke shared a glance with Hitomi and felt their kinship deepen in that moment.

“More of that than this?” Mai asked with a smile, as though Kakashi’s inane bullshit made sense to her.

Kakashi nodded, “Yes, quite right.”

He actually seemed  _ pleased _ , the asshole. 

“Wonderful. You teach the other children the same?”

“Oh, if they’ll learn it.”

“I see,” she said. Then, she grinned, full and broad. “I’d like to meet the rest of your team, Sasuke!”

She said his name but she wasn’t looking at him. Kakashi stiffened, just the slightest bit.

“See, I’ve been away for a long time, and I’d like to check on how things have changed. Hitomi, I’m sure, can benefit from seeing what an education in the village looks like.”

Hitomi nodded as though this had been the plan all along. He suspected she would have nodded if Mai had proposed they eat babies and slaughter puppies. 

Sasuke eyed them both suspiciously.

“And I’m sure it’s been difficult for you to manage on your own, Sasuke, even if you have a teacher who’s proficient in this-and-that.” Despite the mocking words, her tone was almost kind as she turned to him. “I might not have been the closest with… our family, but I do know a bit about our family techniques. I can’t wait to start teaching you, too.”

Hitomi smiled at him, a sliver of white showing behind her pale lips. He was going to learn his family’s techniques, from his family.

It hadn’t occurred to him before this moment, the knowledge he lacked. Generational knowledge, the experience of elders.

He nodded, almost to himself.

“Sounds good.”


	8. we belong way down below

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Beniko.

<strike> **Uzumaki ** </strike> **Beniko**

Her first memory is one of churning surf under her feet. Her father was somewhere high above her, legs like the rocky sides of a fjord, holding his little typhoon steady. Beniko remembers her first steps on the ocean, how it crashed and swept around her, and the feeling of something so vast and beautiful under her tiny toes. The roar of the tide was once her lullaby. 

She should remember the village walls, white limestone dyed red and orange in the fire of the dying sun. The steps on the ocean are not as close to her present as those gleaming walls, yet they are so much clearer now. When she pictures what was once her home, all Beniko can see is ash falling like snow and soot-blackened walls. The salt of the sea is only the tang of blood in her nostrils. 

She doesn’t think it's an exaggeration to say Uzumaki Beniko died that day. She and her elder cousin buried their names like dead things in the bone white sands of the far shore. They became no one, no name orphans, far from the sea, and never spoke of the palatial village of coral reef and eddies that sank beneath the waves. 

Instead, they plied their trade with a new village—killers for a new master. Waterfall. A little country smack dab between two greater powers, holding on to relevance through force of alliances and politics. Their pettiness was a blessing and a curse for Beniko— a blessing, because she was far from anyone who could know her true name, and a curse, because they must take dangerous missions for little pay. You get what you pay for, after all. Shabby villages charged shabby prices. 

When her cousin died on a mission for that little village, she left. Disgusted with the village and disgusted with the system that forced them to lower their prices and up the mission ranks their shinobi could take. Disgusted with shinobi and the whole notion of fighting for a bidder, or for pride, or for the daimyo. It had gotten her nothing but heartache. 

When she scored a line through her headband, she scored a line through the circle of her heart, and vowed to never again fight for something she didn’t believe in. 

It was a promise that led her to re-examine what she did believe in.

Survival. She killed to live. Killed bandits who saw a woman alone as easy prey. Killed other deserters who saw themselves as upstart warlords, leaving the service of the daimyo to start their own little fiefdoms. 

Children. She believed in the future they represented, a world of peace and innocence that maybe she wouldn’t ever see, but hopefully that they would. She couldn’t bring herself to kill even genin, even when they came for her head. She just couldn’t kill the children who were caught in the cogs of war like she was, but so much blinder to being ground to dust. She killed men and women who threatened children. She killed captains and squad leaders and jounin teachers in clashes where they aimed to kill the other squad, regardless of the fact that those kids on the other side were as green as their own.

Beni thought she might have scarred a bunch of kids for life, but so what? She didn’t believe in coddling.

There were other things. She believed her childhood had died with Whirlpool. She believed they'd been sabotaged and betrayed. She believed their allies had abandoned them in their time of need. Or worse, hadn’t been good enough to help and so turned away like cowards.

Beniko believed in anger. She believed in a well of liquid fury so deep it drowned the world. She believed in the blood in her heart and on her hands and in her mouth. She believed she could kill forever. She could spill and spill until she was drowning in the blood sloshing in her lungs and she would never, ever, bring an end to the song of rage beating in her heart. 

She believed in steel, and water, and ink and her own bloody fists and she never lost. And sometimes...

Sometimes.

Sometimes she believed in hell and that some people deserved to be sent there. 

Wiping the blood from her hands onto her pants accomplished nothing, since they were soaked too, but she ignored it and pulled a handkerchief out to clean her face as best she could.

She hummed and murmured an old song, one half forgotten in the ashes of her past.

“_War machine, what was it for?  
_ _ You’re still a stain on the ocean floor.  
_ _ O, whalefall, drumbeat sore,  
__Is this the end that you sought after?”_


	9. burying the dead again and again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Himizu was born in death.

Himizu was born in death. 

She was born in a little village nestled in between two larger countries at odds with each other, whose civilian population was crushed under the weight of two enemy forces mercilessly colliding in their backyard. No civilian seemed to have escaped alive.

It was hours before a lanky man in the white of a medic, a man with a haunted look on his face he’d borne since childhood, finally found her. 

He picked his way through the corpses with care, quickly cataloguing the details of the deaths he saw. Lacerations leading to exsanguinations. Blunt force trauma leading to internal hemorrhaging. Severance or puncturing of vital organs leading to organ failure. The bodies were piled together as though they’d huddled for safety. It was unfortunate that none had found them. It was so… unnecessary. A picture of a pointless massacre.

He carefully shifted bodies, noting lividity and decay, estimating time of death. As he passed each off to another shinobi for destruction, he constructed for himself in his mind’s eye the battle as it swept over them. Out of the darkness of uncertainty, he saw slashes of blades, lashes of fire; he saw the people crouched together, arms about one another, those who had clasped their hands in fervent pleas and those who had screwed their eyes shut to face the end.

Each person, a life, ended all too soon. For what? Neither side gained any territory in this clash and it would provoke no concessions. Useless waste. 

Between two broad men, he was mildly surprised to find a young woman—a girl really—whose body was curled protectively around a bundle of bloody cloth. She had disturbed the blood of the two men, by all evidence having come upon them when they were already dead. She’d laid down between them of her own will, he surmised, possibly to hide. She bore no wounds from steel or chakra. Unlike the others, she hadn’t been killed. No, it appeared she had died simply from the natural strain of birth, unaided and unprepared, alone in a field of death. She had stuffed bloody clothes into her mouth, a gag against the cries of pain and fear that almost certainly came upon her. 

He felt an immense sadness and also reverence for this act of bravery. Though she likely knew she would die unaided, she did not risk drawing the attention of the invaders. He carefully removed the wad of bloody rags from her arms, ready to face the infant this woman died for, ready to bury it with the rest. 

He found it staring back at him with eyes pale as the reaper and skin like ash—cold, almost frostbitten, but still impossibly, unbelievably alive. 

It was only his decades of medical experience that kept her that way, as he quickly set to work warming her tiny body and killing the rot that was taking hold from within. She was weak, smaller than she should be. Premature. And yet there was a resilience that almost pulled at his chakra, demanding to be nourished. 

Demanding to live. 

He worked for hours. He didn’t react to the arrival of his compatriots, accepting the cloth wiping away his sweat only because it did not interfere. 

Later he couldn’t say why he had worked so diligently, when it was not his responsibility nor his area of expertise to save lives. He only remembered the defiant curve of a young woman’s spine as she shielded her bundle from the world. Hope in the face of death. Life, where only death should have been. 

He couldn’t bring himself to consign her to a life in an orphanage. He had saved her life and felt responsible for it now. In a way, he imagined it was his duty to carry on that poor girl’s effort to keep her baby alive. To maintain the miracle. 

He cut back on field missions, practically barricading himself in the autopsy lab until his superiors just stopped trying to send him anywhere. He was the best medical examiner so what did it matter if he did his investigations in the lab and not the field? 

He set his little girl (Himizu, a mix of his mother’s name and the name of the girl’s village that was altogether bland) in a playpen made from medical texts and jars too heavy for the girl to move until much, much later. 

When she showed an interest in his work, he would diligently explain while she watched what he was doing in words he hoped helped her understand. She was an intelligent child, and quiet as the grave. Her pale eyes peered, it seemed, straight into his soul. There was an air of something older and wiser, he thought, when he looked at her–the clinging, cloying scent of death tangled up in her course, straw-colored hair. 

She was always very careful and cautious. She stepped lightly in his footsteps behind him, checked the area around her whenever she had to move, and never touched anything he did not tell her to touch. He’d heard that children could be difficult sometimes, but he found the actual experience to be easy. He fed her when she was hungry, spoke to her regularly, and taught her what she needed to know. Simple. 

Of course, she was possibly brain-damaged or under-developed from her premature birth and the hours of freezing conditions she’d endured as a baby. So maybe she was unusual. 

It suited him fine. He had often been called unusual by his peers. 

It was no surprise to him that Himizu took a greater interest in his work the older she got; he had been prepared to teach her all he knew about death and more besides. He was, however, slightly surprised when she said she wanted to be a ninja as well. Although a shinobi himself, he hadn’t been on a single mission since the one where he found her. He hadn’t really talked about that kind of work much, except to explain the deaths they studied in his lab.

When he asked why, she looked contemplatively at the open chest cavity he was working on.

“There’s… more to it. Than this,” she said finally. 

He looked down at the organs sprawled across his hands and table, and made the connection.

Death. 

Indeed, there was another side, a life. 

And there was a moment she had never seen, where one transitioned into another.

“Alright,” he agreed. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> accidental baby acquisition is the best way to become a parent. nice job Shigeru!


	10. Year of the Rabbit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Momoka needs this promotion.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yoshida Momoka and Himura Shikoku belong to @treatyofversigh!

The words just kept echoing in her head.

_ ‘Team four! _ ’ Iruka had called out. In hindsight, it sounded like a death knell and she pictured the other new genin shrinking back in their chairs to escape the oppressive presence of even the  _ words _ .  _ ‘Himura Shikoku and Yoshida Momoka, you will be joined by a genin from the previous year.’ _

And then he’d just gone on, like he hadn’t just signed her death warrant. 

Team four! Of all the unlucky numbers to be back in circulation… The idiot and Mr. Future-Serial-Killer got lucky number 7 with some bubblegum haired twig in a red cheongsam and her adorable self got the freaking death number.

Great. Perfect. More proof that the world  _ exclusively _ tormented her.

How could they possibly be a good team if they were cursed right out of the gate? She was supposed to become a super cool, super cute ninja, marry some rich dude and live an incredibly fabulous life to spite the idiots who had the nerve to bully her.

She’d changed her whole wardrobe dramatically, cut her hair and put it in pigtails, and willed herself into a more forceful, thicker skinned person! She’d raised her grades by sheer force of will and made it through the genin exam!

She couldn’t do all the work in making her dreams come true! If her team slacked, there was no way she’d live to see sixteen, let alone meet the guy with the checkbook of her dreams.

And what was that shit about their third member being a genin already? That meant they’d either sucked so bad their team got promoted ahead of them, or their teammates were killed! Which, uh, team four? Team four! If she survived once it was likely to happen again. Momoka was too young and cute to die. And she had people she needed to destroy socially and mentally. 

At least the second name their teacher had called was one she didn’t really recognize. If she knew them, they were already her sworn enemies, and she could not be on a team with  _ them _ . Small mercies.

She turned her head to track the approach of a boy from across the room. At first, she thought he was just slow. Then she realized.

“Are you kidding me? I’ll look ridiculous next to you!”

The boy frowned, eyebrows knitted in confusion. He was, indeed, tall. Not just tall but broad, and he’d probably only get bigger and broader. He might have been cute in an abstract way but his clothes reeked of poverty and she had to aim high to achieve her dreams. 

“No offense, Shikoku? Shikoku, I’m sure you’re a really cool guy and all, but you’re huge! Sensei said our third is a girl from last year and our teacher is a woman! There’s no way to frame this that looks good, ugh.”

No way to frame it that makes her look good, anyway. Momo melodramatically dropped her head to the desk, then rolled it around in anguish.

“Uh,” the boy said, with a surprisingly light voice, “sorry?”

“You didn’t choose the teams,” she mumbled into the desk. 

“Hey, team four?” A new voice interrupted. 

Momoka’s head popped back up like a rabbit out of its hole. A girl, dressed sensibly in green and khaki, with a bandana keeping her dirty straw-colored hair out of her face, was stalking towards them.

Stalking because this chick obviously never walked anywhere. She had a tired slouch that matched the dark bags under her eyes, and the tip of some kind of pole weapon or quarterstaff protruded past her shoulder. She was, frankly, unhealthily pale and looked like she hadn’t even heard of shampoo. 

But holy shit. She was huge!

She was nearly as tall as Shikoku, and from the gangly look of her limbs and the size of the hand reaching up in a vague approximation of a dying man’s final wave, she would get taller.

“Oh, I can work with this.”

The girl gave her a look that was half confused and half a plea for the merciful release of death. That was okay, because if both of her teammates were freakishly tall, she was in the middle of their formations by default. Nothing would make sense if she wasn’t, and she’d always have these massive kids like bodyguards flanking her! All! The! Time!

“Jackpot! I’m so sorry I doubted you, ‘Koku!”

Shikoku’s bewildered expression was rivaled only by the possible astral projection thing the other girl was doing.

“Uh, yeah,” she finally said, re-emerging from the depths of the void. “Himizu. You two?”

“Himura Shikoku.”

“Oh right, yeah. Yoshida Momoka, nice to meet you,” she said, waving away the introduction like it offended her. “So when’s the sensei getting here? I have to know how our group rounds out.”

If she was tall, they could all surround Momo. If she was short, well, the teacher didn’t have to be ‘part’ of the group when they took photos or entered a room. She was kinda like an entourage. 

This was good. A good start. Four or no, things were definitely looking up. Literally, she snickered, glancing first at Koku, then at Himizu. 

The older genin ran a hand over her face. “Last time my sensei sent us a note with a location and time to meet up. If she didn’t do that, she’ll probably show up within the hour.”

It  _ was _ useful to have someone with experience on the team. “So how’s this gonna go down? We do introductions and have dinner or something?”

“Or something,” Himizu said with a shrug. “Every teacher is different. They can do whatever they want as long as they don’t kill us.”

That sent a chill down Momoka’s spine. She made it sound like they were waiting for an ambush, not a teacher. “Are you for real?”

“Well, I guess they probably can’t cripple us either,” she went on, staring blankly into nothing. “Even if we don’t make the cut, we’re still  _ trained _ . Wasted resources, otherwise.”

“Make the cut?” Momka yelped. “What? What?”

Himizu finally looked down at her new teammate with something like awareness in her eyes. 

“Oh, yeah, you guys are new.”

That was all she said, but the way her eyes rolled from Shikoku to her to back again told Momo she was sizing them up. She felt herself bristling, but she swallowed her temper down. Ladies don’t get angry.

Himizu snickered. “I guess it doesn’t matter if I tell you. You’re gonna find out either way.”

“Tell us what?” Shikoku spoke for the first time since his name.

Himizu’s grin was like what happened when skulls still had skin but not much else–cold and unfeeling. Not even a spark in her eyes.

“Jounin are too valuable to waste on a bunch of no-name brats. They’re elite who train elite. They get to decide, in whatever way they want by whatever metric they want, if they teach the squad they’re assigned. If they find us lacking, they ship us off to the Genin Corp to learn under chunin, or back to the Academy, or, hell, even dismiss us from the program entirely.”

“Wh-what?” Momoka choked out. Her eyes were wide with fear. No way. This wasn’t happening. She passed, damn it, she passed! Some broad she’d never met was going to look at them for five minutes and decide their whole future?

“Why are you so un-fucking-bothered?” She hissed, unable to keep her mouth shut against the boiling pot of anger and fear inside her. 

Shikoku gave her a weird look, but Himizu only grinned wider.

“Because I’m already a genin, dumbass,” Himizu chuckled. “I’m  _ already _ in the program, and better yet, I’ve had a year of training. I’m not going  _ anywhere _ .”

_ But you might not make the cut  _ went unsaid, but Momoka could feel it pulsing against her ears. When she shut her eyes, it was there, mocking her. It pounded like her pulse,  _ not good enough, not good enough _ , over and over.

“Like hell I’m going anywhere either,” she snarled. She glanced around to see if anyone was watching, then hopped forward to kneel on the desk, lashing out with both hands to snag the collars of her much taller, much stronger teammates. She dragged them down to her level, nonetheless, and glared right in Himizu’s dead eyes and Shikoku’s concerned frown. 

“I’m not gonna be a no-name genin getting thrown around like cannon fodder. So both of you, listen up. This team passes. We get our teacher, we get our promotion, and we get respect. Either it passes or, so help me, I’ll make your lives a living hell.  _ Capiche _ ?”

Shikoku’s eyebrows climbed towards his hairline, but he nodded. Good.

She looked at their deadpan, already-a-genin teammate, and bared her teeth. 

Himizu, the crazy bitch, just chuckled. 

“Uh, yeah, no shit. It’s too much work to get  _ another _ team. You two had better not slouch, ‘cause we’re  _ gonna _ be team four.”

That’s what Momo liked to hear.

Things were looking up again!

Shikoku ruined it by asking, “Is that what happened to your old teammates?”

“Oh, they died.”

_ Fuck _ .

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> she really bounces around a lot! haha! get it?


End file.
